If a business considers its entire market (i.e., the unique values it business brings to a transaction that earns and keeps customers) – it quickly become apparent they have to go beyond CRM and the sales force, and start thinking long term.
By definition, the sales force sells and then leaves - until there is something else to sell. For example, they sell razors and leave the production of the razor blades, the customer service, and razor blade user support to the rest of the team. Every business knows that the repeated value of the razor blade is what creates long term prosperity for the firm - the lifetime value of the customer and the firm – they want people to keep buying your razor blades. This means creating a connection with customers that isn't just a sales based relationship. Creating a connection with a market deeper than selling, is going beyond managing leads – it actually creates qualified sales leads. How? Slowly, surely, and over time as companies and customers connect and build a relationship.
People actually want to connect. People search, use social networks, save and sort information, speak, select and stick only if they go through the entire cycle themselves – we call this the "self discovery" market. Google is a very helpful tool for people to connect – it helps people sort information through search and PPC ads, and save information with bookmarks, social spaces, email, and other information management systems.
However, not everyone is searching and saving at the exact time they want to purchase something. This is where a typical sales cycle starts to fall apart. Sales people and the companies they work for don’t want, or more likely can’t afford to wait for a year to get a sale or commission. The problem (especially in a “buyers market”) then becomes, if a business can’t get a buyer at the exact time the leads are searching the lead is worthless, contact is lost, and the company moves on. Not a good strategy for building a business or a solid set of connections. A potential customer might want to buy a house next year, after they get married, but it doesn’t mean they’re not going to start looking for information on loans, mortgages and markets now.
Therefore, a business has a need for a consistent process of market participation and conversation marketing. A successful business will want to provide information for as long as it takes for the leads to mature. When a business does this, it's building a deeper connection and creating that qualified group of connections in a market space. However, would it be too time consuming to provide that level of service to every customer that comes in the door with a vague request for information? Not necessarily.
What businesses need for is a marketing robot. Robots are not pushy and they are not emotional, they are informative and repetitive. They can handle high volumes of people, can watch and learn and understand new things and create the right "space" for buyers and sellers without leaving the connection behind because the timing is wrong. Robots can help create a conversation that can be revisited at any time. No sales force, marketing team or single person can do that - no matter how good they are - nor will they if they are compensated like most sales people - in commission. Effectively, this is how search engines started and still exist; however, a search engine is a one way cycle and is manipulated through "optimization" and a code set that decides what is relevant.
For a successful connection, humans should decide what is relevant to them, and then find that information. Nobody ever feels like Google helps them make an informed decision – it just gives them information they specifically requested and leaves them to make the decisions themselves.
This is why conversation marketing and social networking is taking off so rapidly. People trust and talk to other people. People start by searching, but then they start narrowing down what they were thinking about and begin asking real people. In short, they make a connection and follow it through.  In reality there is nothing about Google that makes anyone stick, other than sheer size of the search market. Once a lead comes through Google, a business still has to start that conversation!
That is where a robot can help for a clever business. When people search and don’t get information or a meaningful connection, they will search again. So if a business can catch those searchers the first time, providing information to real people and in answering questions, it will be associated with the most valuable information about its market, and it will start to have engaged conversations with searchers.
That is unbeatable - if a business can get in the conversation, and staring helping to drive the conversation, it becomes a focal point, and more and more people will join in. Real people.  Interested people. People that are buyers. A robot helps because it grows and is patiently waiting and capturing and responding. It doesn't lose interest or "move on" like a salesperson will. It will cultivate and till the fields of prospects and create conversations and referrals and a community of people interested in a product or service. Â
There are hundreds of millions of people on the internet. A business only needs a few hundred or a few thousand of those people to decide that it is the expert, and the destination for solid, real useful information to be wildly successful, highly ranked on Google, and drive more success from natural brand advocates and community members than it ever could from PPC advertising or paid search.
So how can a business create its robot? How can it start generating real conversations and connections?
Contact us. We can help.
Note: This blog post has been adapted by the CMAEON staff from notes our CEO Tim Vasko wrote for his upcoming book.
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